Nancy Phelan - The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack

Interviewed by [talk at Mosman Library] on 28 June 1990

Nancy Phelan speaks about her book the Romantic Lives of Louise Mack at Mosman Library I 1991. Louise Mack was the first Australian female war correspondent who reported on the German invasion of Antwerp in the First World War for the British papers.

As Kay has told you, Louise was my aunt and she appears – if you read Kingdom by the Sea you may remember an eccentric aunt, at least one of the eccentric aunts, who appeared fairly late in the book and after that book came out, for years – it’s a long time since that book first came out – for years people had said to me, Why don’t you write something about that aunt of yours, who was a writer and traveller, etc., a great character? And I said, oh no, I don’t want to write any more about the family, I’ve written that book and I’ve written a book about a biography of my cousin, Charles Mackerras, under pressure, and I put my father into a book and I thought, I don’t want to be a family historian, so I said I wouldn’t do it.

Then about three years ago Barbara Carr Wilson, who was editor for the University of Queensland Press, started to needle me about it, and I said, Well, you see, I don’t think there’s enough material. I’d talked to various people and they all said, Oh, we don’t know much about her and she’s been away so much, she was out of the country for so many years, and so I said I wouldn’t do it, and Barbara went on being very persuasive so in the end I said, I’ll see what I can find, and I started to dig.

Well, it took two and a half, nearly three years and twice I went over to London and Italy, and I found there was a great deal of information that not only did I not know but I’m perfectly certain the family didn’t know.

Even so, when we discussed this talk, I said to Kay I’d talk it ‘the search for Louise’ because that’s exactly what it became. It became a search, which to me was so fascinating. I knew I had to write a book at the end of all the digging but it was just like a detective story, one thing leading to another, and then coming to a brick wall and thinking you can’t go any further, and then suddenly finding a little clue which led you in another direction.

In the end, I found that there was enough for the book. There’s still certain things that we will never know. I’m not going to tell you what they are; you’ve got to read the book because if I tell you now it will spoil the book.

So I started off. I did have the advantage of having known Louie because when she came back from abroad I was in my teens and I had met her when I was very small and shy. She frightened the life out of me because she was very grand and – it’s in Kingdom by the Sea – she took us to the pantomime. I was about three, and my brother John was about one, and this great treat, we were being taken, it was in a box, everything was done with great gestures, and it was Bluebeard, and they had a scene with the wives’ heads and blood hanging on a sort of wall of blood, and I was a bit uneasy about that. The next scene was a ballet of skeletons, and they were in all-over black tights with phosphorous and I was terrified! My mother kept saying, Oh they’re pussy cats! But I knew they weren’t pussy cats and I started to cry. Louie was disgusted. Little Belgian children didn’t cry under the bombardment of Antwerp! And of course I was not very keen on her.

After many years, when she was a sort of legend in the background of the family, nobody saw a sign of her, nobody knew what she was doing. She just evaporated, and then one day – some of the family had seen her in London, they’d been over to London and they’d seen her, but then she went to live in Italy for quite a long time, but one time my grandmother, who’d gone blind and was sitting on her verandah, my mother was there with her, she heard footsteps coming up the steps and a voice said, Hello Ma, and my grandmother, who of course couldn’t see, said, Is that you, Alice? and the voice said, No, it’s me, Lou. They hadn’t seen her for 12 years.

So she entered my life again and then I saw quite a lot of her but she died, she lived her last years at Mosman and there’s quite a lot of overlapping in those two books, towards the end of that book. It was difficult to write in a way because I didn’t want to write another Kingdom by the Sea and yet so many things did intertwine.

I started to dig up what I could find. I knew from family stories, my mother was always telling me stories about Lou’s adventures and what they did when they were children and when they were girls and so forth. All that was very familiar, but of course my mother was a wonderful storyteller but she wasn’t so hot on getting her facts right. She used to tell those stories in fits and starts. She’d tell you something, and then the next time she’d go on with the story she’d skip about 40 years but she wouldn’t bother to tell you that. She’d bring out these amusing and entertaining episodes, so that one got an extremely jumbled idea of what happened, it was very interesting and very romantic but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could put down on paper in a book.

So I had to check an awful lot and I found that some of it was absolute fiction and some of it was quite wise except for the little facts. She had a marvellous memory for things, the smallest details about when she was a child and when they were growing up. There were five sisters and they were very, very devoted. They were all very different but they were all very devoted. Lou was the ringleader, and of course Louie’s great friend was Ethel Turner. They were at school together and then they were very, very close friends. Louie went away to England in 1901 and so there was quite a lot of material here in the libraries, in the Mitchell Public Library and various other places.

I had to dig around in the Methodist archives because of my grandfather who was a Methodist minister. The children were born in different parts of Australia, Tasmania, all over the place, because he was moved every three years. The Methodist archives in the Historical Society were very good. People were very, very good, most helpful, but it was an awful lot of digging and so forth.

One of the greatest helps – the book’s in three parts and one of the greatest helps, for which I was extremely, more than grateful, was Ethel Turners’ unpublished diaries because she a record of just about everything that happened. She was most meticulous. Louie never wrote anything down. She never kept letters. She left absolutely no papers at all. She was a biographer’s nightmare in that sense. She had no sense of possessions. She enjoyed life and moved on, that was the whole of her character. So try and find out anything that she might have written, such as diaries and letters, was impossible.

However, Ethel had this marvellous diary, as you know, quite a lot has been published by her grand-daughter, Philippa Poole, and Philippa gave permission for me to use the unpublished diaries, so I was in the Mitchell for weeks on end. It was a very strange experience because I knew so many – I didn’t know them because most of them were dead but so many of the names of the people that she wrote about as young law students and girls and their friends were people whose names I’d known all my life because either I’d heard about them from my mother or they were the grown-ups of my childhood. It was an extraordinary experience.

Ethel’s diaries were so vivid that when I came out of the Mitchell – they were microfilm and it was hot and stuffy, it was summer and the Mitchell is pretty stuffy, and there I was poring over this thing in this little box for hours. I was there every day for about three weeks and then I’d come out into the modern city of Sydney, which was sort of raffish and dirty and noisy and hot, coming out of this 1890s world where everything was so different, and in her diaries she wasn’t trying to impress anybody; she was just putting it down as she saw it, but because she was so meticulous, she wrote every detail, what people said and what they wore, so that was wonderful.

It also confirmed or contradicted some of the old stories, but it made things very alive and it did give this terrific feeling of being real people and being life.

Then, of course, Louie started to write and she started off by – well, she was always writing. These two girls were mad about literature, they were mad about writing, and they talked about literature all the time. Louie wrote a poem, a very soulful poem; it was called Soul Flight and it was about a soul leaving the body. It was quite a long poem but she showed it to Ethel and she showed it to the friend whom she eventually married, and they said she should send it to The Bulletin. So she did. She sent it off and she signed it ‘M L Mack’. Her name was Marie Louise. She got a letter back from The Bulletin saying ‘Dear Sir, please come and see us’ from Archibald, the editor, who of course to them, to those girls, he was like God.

So Louie went in. She was so nervous she had to go six times. She kept getting to the door and then running away. Eventually I think John Creed, her boyfriend, went with her and she finally got upstairs. Archibald nearly had a fit when he saw this pretty young girl in a cotton dress was M L Mack because he thought it was a man. From then on he wanted her to write more for The Bulletin and that’s how she started.

Meanwhile Ethel was writing and of course she’d written Seven Little Australians and so on.

So their lives both started on writing. It wasn’t hard to find out a certain amount about that in the libraries because of the things they’d written and a lot of the books by Louie’s contemporaries, their memoirs and so forth, mentioned her, talked about her.

Another thing was that she started writing stories, not putting them on paper but writing them in her mind, when she was very, very young and then she made them into short stories for different publications, and they’re absolutely autobiographical, about their childhood and life in a Methodist parsonage and so forth, and very funny and very alive. So that was a great help to me because I knew from my mother that this was actually fact; this is how it was.

People have said about the book that they feel the people are alive. Well, that’s why, because it was written by the people who experienced it.

Then Louie and Ethel both fell in love with law students. Louie was introduced to the man she married by Herbert Curlewis through Ethel, and Ethel met Herbert through Louie’s brother Sid, and my father was one of the students, too, so there were all these young people together and both Louie and Ethel had very tortured unofficial engagements because my grandmother didn’t approve of John Creed. She liked him but he was known to have what used to be called a ‘failing’ in those days; in other words, he drank. He was a very charming Irish larrikin and that was a mystery.

This is where we come on to the mysteries. When we were kids or growing up, not very often but every now and then someone would say, What happened to Auntie Louie’s husband? – Oh, he died. – What was he like? – A charming Irishman, absolutely charming. We couldn’t get anything more out of them than that. My aunt Amy was very fond of John Creed and she told my sister Sheila that he drank. We couldn’t get my mother to say that. So nice, they all loved him. They were all awfully fond of him and he must have been awfully nice. I think he was just weak.

However, Jemima didn’t want Louie to marry him because she thought he wasn’t tough enough to manage Louie. Anyway, she was very headstrong and she was in love and so after a great deal of messing around between the whole lot of them she got married and then Ethel got married.

At first she was very, very happy. Now John Creed, what I might say is what I did was I dug up a skeleton and I had to put flesh on the bones because, for example, I never met John Creed. He was out of this picture before I was born. I’ve been digging and digging here, I dug in Ireland, I can’t find out anything about his death, what happened to him. The only people who could tell me are now dead. But I knew a aunt from the family background and I knew enough from the things that had been said and from Ethel’s diary, again, this was a wonderful help, because they remained friends, she and Herbert were very good to John Creed after Louie left the country.

Eventually, Louie was taken on to the Bulletin, she became one of the bright lights of the literary world and she was a friend of all the writers. She used to bring them all home to the Macks’ place for meals and put them up for the night. People would be turned out of their beds for them. As she got older she would bring home the poets and the writers. First of all it was just some old school friends and then it became the poets and the writers and some of them I’m sure my grandmother didn’t approve of – I won’t say any names but some of them got a bit wild and they all drank.

She was very popular and she was writing a lot and she was a great success. Mind you, I don’t want to sound nasty but things were much easier in those days. There wasn’t anything like the competition and the standards seem to me, when I read a lot of the stuff that is still fished out and described as being Australian literature, I think it’s so bad; it shouldn’t really be unearthed. Of course there was some good stuff but there was a lot of very mediocre, particularly verse. It’s just a historical curiosity to my mind. A lot of Louie’s stuff was like that. They were all pretty well guilty of the same thing but they did write some good things.

However, they were dedicated to writing and they all seemed to have this wonderful free attitude that they weren’t going to be bound by convention, or not so much convention as material things, that art was the thing to live for, which was a rather idealistic charming Bohemian atmosphere, and that was very real to me when I was growing up because my parents were always talking about it and they were always reminiscing about it. As I think I said in Kingdom by the Sea, I had it absolutely mixed in my mind, the Left Bank in Paris. I thought all these people were all the same when I was a child.

Louie’s marriage was not getting on very well and eventually it got to the stage where she couldn’t take any more. John Creed was drinking and obviously there was no chance of him stopping so she went off to Europe.

She had practically no money. She’d had this job on the Bulletin writing Woman’s Letter and she’d published Teens and Girls Together and another book. I don’t think she could have had very much because she never kept money. If she had money she spent it. She was very generous and she was very extravagant. I suppose she had enough for her fare and she might have had enough to keep her for a while.

She’d been told that when she got to London, if she wanted to get a job writing for magazines, serials and stories and things, someone had given her an address at Harmsworth Press and she said, no, it was all art and it was all ideals and she was going to write this book, if she had to starve. Well, she did starve. She started off all cheerful and then she made up her mind she was going to write this book. She had to live while she wrote it and she had no money, very little money, so she moved into a very cheap room in Bloomsbury and she wrote and wrote. Her money went and she got colder and colder and more and more hungry, more and more exhausted, but she wouldn’t give in.

By the time she’d finished it she didn’t have enough money to post it. She walked around to the publisher, it was Fisher Unwin who published her first book in Australia, and she was so weak that she had to lie in bed for a couple of days because she was starving.

By this time I might add that my grandfather had died. He’d died quite early in the piece, of heart trouble, and left his widow with all these 13 kids. Most of them were growing up at that stage but still, there was no point in writing home for money because nobody had any money at this end, so she had to manage.

Also she was very independent, very proud, and very brave. She knew that if she was going to live to see this book in print – she didn’t even know if it was going to be accepted but she was hoping it would be accepted – but if she did she would have to have some money to live, to eat, she had absolutely nothing.

She was in despair and she suddenly remembered she’d been told about this Harmsworth Press run by Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers, who published stories and serials. She’d been very contemptuous about it, it was all soap opera stuff and she called it ‘lower literature’ and she wasn’t going to but she realised that she’d have to do something if she was going to stay alive long enough to know if this book was going to come out.

So she decided to go and apply for a job. I think she must have written in. When the day came, she was living in Bloomsbury and the newspaper was down in Fleet Street. She didn’t have enough money for the bus fare and she knew that if she walked her shoes would fall to pieces because they were so worn. She was extremely pretty and she was very resilient and as I say she had terrific courage, so she decided she’d just pull herself together. She had one good dress, she was always hoping someone would ask her out for a meal at a restaurant. She just pulled herself together and made herself look as pretty as she could, she went out and she got a cab, she took it down to the newspaper and when she got there she got out of the cab and told the commissionaire to charge it to the fiction editor. She jumped in the lift and went upstairs!

Fortunately for her, she got the job. I don’t know what would have happened otherwise.

It was very funny. I’ve described in her own words the interview when she was being interviewed about writing this trash.

Eventually she tried and she couldn’t do it because it was so ridiculous. They said, you’ve got to learn to write with your tongue in your cheek, so she managed. She was very poetic. She was writing about London and mists and falling leaves, all sorts of poetic things, and she had to pull her socks up and write this idiotic stuff for the magazine. Anyway, she managed to do it, and then of course Fisher Unwin wrote and said they were going to publish the book, they were very keen about it.

She wanted to call it – she told me – she was a terrible liar, I might add, she used to exaggerate to make a good story, but she wanted to call it ‘Winter Traces’ and they said no, it’s got to have something a little bit more matter of fact and prescriptive, so it was called An Australian Girl in London. Well, it became an enormous critical success. It had absolutely rave reviews. I’ve seen all the reviews. As a result of this, suddenly, instead of starving in a garret, she was being wined and dined by literary London and she was taken up by W T Stead who was the editor of a very famous journal called Review of Reviews. Now I went over to London. I tried to get information about the Review of Reviews here, but of course you couldn’t, so I went over to London and I was digging around in a British library which was part of the British Museum where they had all these things, all the copies of these magazines, and it was a marvellous journal. It was absolutely wonderful. It had everything under the sun. It was so alive, it was so intelligent, it was so interesting. Stead was an extraordinary man. He was interested in everything. He took a great fancy to Louie and she became his protégé. She had been the protégé of Archibald out here and A G Stevens, the famous critic in Sydney, and she was having a absolute ball.

Stead and his wife were awfully good to her and so she was having a lovely time, but she wasn’t making much money out of this book that received so much praise. She had to do something to keep alive, and meanwhile these terrible serials, she suddenly discovered she was a great success with these stories that she’d despised. Knowing Louie, I imagine what would be in her mind was I’ll just go and do another one and then I’ll stop and really go back to proper writing. Well, of course, what happened was that she had to go on because she was caught. She had to have clothes, she was going about and being entertained and life had changed. She’d moved out of the attic where she starved and so on.

So this went on for a while. I found all these reviews and the various things about Louie in the British library. Then she suddenly went to Italy, decided to go and live in Italy. She went to Florence. It was terribly hard to find out what was actually going on; nobody quite knew how or why, whether she’d saved up enough money to live on, whether she’d eloped with somebody, nobody knew.

Anyway, off she went to Italy. I think she always had this romantic passion for Italy, even before she got there, she was always writing poems about Italy, it was her spiritual home, and of course when she got there she absolutely adored it and she just stayed there. She wrote and she became the editor of a paper called the Italian Gazette. I couldn’t find out anything about the Italian Gazette. Here I wrote to the British Institute Library in Florence and they knew about the paper but things were very difficult because of the distance so I went over. I went to the Library, I had a friend who lived in Florence, not far from where the British Institute is, and I stayed there, and I used to go every morning to this Library, down in the bowels of the earth, a very spooky place. I think it had been flooded during the bad floods. It was under the level of the Arno.

They had this thing, these old yellow pages with a stale smell, and I was poring over them, and it was a most awful paper. It was terrible, snobbish, all about the distinguished titled English people who were living in Florence and the Italians were hardly mentioned. They were just like background. I used to think of this thing that Louie used to quote to us. I found these little verses in an issue of the Gazette. Something about Florence, the Italians. We ought to be very patient and always try to forget that if Florence was built for the English the Italians are still there as yet. It was just like an English enclave, English and American. They had their tea rooms, they had their clubs, they had their grocer who sold English bacon and English cheese. They hardly knew they were abroad and they all mixed together. They were all people like Lady Ida and George Sitwell and the Actons and all sorts of barons and so forth.

Louie’s name didn’t appear anywhere. Every issue had a list of the residents. No mention of Louise Mack or Mrs Creed, so I began to wonder what’s happened to Louie. Is she living in hiding, was she never there at all? She was supposed to have had an apartment on the banks of the Arno, she was supposed to have had a villa up in Settignano. I couldn’t see anything about her anywhere. I thought, perhaps she’s non persona grata, perhaps she’s somebody’s mistress and she’s living somewhere in obscurity.

So I went up to Settignano and of course I didn’t know where the villa was and I wandered about and I couldn’t get any idea of where she had been. I thought, oh well, I’ve just drawn a blank here.

So I went back to London and I went back to the British Library and I was digging around, and I suddenly thought, I wonder if there are any copies of the Italian Gazette – the Italian Gazette in Florence had big gaps, several years missing, and I thought, I wonder if this marvellous Library, which had everything that’s ever been in print, might have some copies of the Italian Gazette, so I asked and they had them, and they were the very ones that I wanted. All the years that Louie was there, and they were in the British Library newspaper library, because the main library as you know is the British Museum is in Lewis Street but the other one is way up the end of the Northern Line at an awful place and it was very hard, there was a strike going on and the Underground was not working anywhere, but I went trailing out there every day and I found these things.

It was really marvellous because they have very much better microfilm than we’ve got in the State Library. The ones in the State Library are always breaking down and you’ve got to turn a handle. The ones in the British Library, you press a button and it goes this way or that way, and I was in this sort of box going through these things on microfilm. Suddenly there it was! Mrs John Creed, Louise Mack, had taken a villa, the name of the villa, up in Settignano, and then she was on the list of residents, where her apartment was, Lung Arno on the banks of the Arno.

It was quite exciting. You’re not allowed to speak a word in that place, and I was dying to call out!

As I went through, it was a terrible business getting there because I was staying at Chelsea and it was absolutely cross country to get there, but I was so enthralled with this search I would have slept there!

I got all this material and then I thought, I should go back to Italy now I know where these places are, and I couldn’t. For one thing, I was running out of money, and another thing, I was running out of time because I had a ticket which, not realising it was going to be like this, I had bought a ticket which took me around to America because I wanted to go and see my daughter. So I tried to work out how I could get back to Italy and it was so complicated that I came back and there was, I have to leave a gap here because there was this mystery in Louie’s life which has never been solved and I do not think it ever will be solved.

Whatever it was, it pointed to me as happening in Italy, in Florence. It seems to me the only place where it could have happened because anywhere else, somebody would have known. If it had been London her family would have known because her brother was there and her sisters were always going over there and staying.

I was very dubious about it ever solving this mystery. I did the best I could but I just kept drawing a blank. I was searching all over the place. I came back to Australia and I had already written a couple of drafts of the book. I mostly write books three, four, five times. Each time I pull it to pieces and chop bits out and change bits, so I did it again and then I thought, I must go back to Italy, I can’t finish this book unless I do.

So I managed to get back. I got a small grant from the Literature Board and I went back and I found the house! It was an incredible experience. I found the apartment, I found the places where she’d been living. It was an extraordinary experience because she had described these things so vividly in her books. She’d always talked about things to us. She used to talk about Italian servants and the things they did and what they said and the people she’d known in France, but it was all disconnected. It was all little episodes, little bits of reminiscence, but nothing consecutive that you could really use.

But there it all was, and it was all as she had described it and it was remarkable because a book she wrote at the end of her life was – she died in 1935 and this book came out at the beginning of the year, she died in November and I think it came out at the beginning of that year or the end of the year before. She was 64 when she died and it was long time since she’d been in Italy. She left there in 1910 and she had described the gardens, the house, the people, everything so vividly that when I was walking along the road that she’d described to this villa it was quite spooky in a sense, but so beautiful.

I might add that after she left Florence she went back to London and this is where another mystery is. I don’t know why she went back to London because she adored Italy. However, she did go back and she took up again writing these junky serials and she became a queen of romance! She was a sort of Barbara Cartland, except she was never like Barbara Cartland in that she was totally unmaterialistic. She never accumulated money and she just spent the money that she got.

She was writing these things and they were being translated into many languages and sometimes she said she was writing three serials at once, and so she didn’t get the characters mixed up she used to write the eyes, hair and things in lists and put them up on the wall. I often thought Barbara Cartland did that because some of her books the heroine has beautiful blue eyes on page 10 and on page 19 she’s got brown eyes. Honestly, that’s happened many times.

Then came the First War and Louie decided that she would go to the War. She went to Lord Northcliffe who was [UNCLEAR] and said she wanted to go as a war correspondent. We never quite knew what happened. She used to say Northcliffe sent me to the War. Other times she’d say, I went to see Northcliffe and said I wanted to go to the War, so I don’t know which was true but she got all the credentials she needed and off she went.

She went off in a party of war correspondents, male correspondents. Frankly, I don’t think she was sent to write about the fighting; I think she was probably sent to write about the people, human interest sort of thing. She went off with all these male correspondents and they arrived in Ostend and they’d only been there five minutes when a rumour came around saying that the Germans, the Kaiser had declared that all war correspondents would be shot on site, so they all got back on the boat and went back to England.

When they got back Louie felt terribly ashamed and she also, I’m perfectly certain, felt she was missing something, so she decided to go back and she took everything she possessed. I can’t think why but she took her best clothes, she had some beautiful clothes, Paris dresses and furs that she’d bought, because she loved every single thing. Off she went and she got as far as Antwerp, which was being threatened by the Germans. Brussels had already been occupied by the Germans and the male correspondents were all gathered in Antwerp in a hotel and they laughed at her. They said, you’ll be sent home as soon as anything happens. She said, I didn’t even bother to argue with them.

She decided to go to Brussels and interview the Burgomeister. They said, you’ll never get there, you’ll be shot, you’ll be caught as a spy, but anyway she went, she got there, she got behind the German lines and she got all sorts of adventures.

She got there and she got back to Antwerp just in time for the Germans to arrive. The male correspondents all went and they said, come on, you must go. She said, I’m not going to go. I’m not going to miss the last act of my drama. So she stayed behind and they all went. She wanted to gather around by the bombardment. She disguised herself as a Flemish maid. She made the kitchen staff help her and the Germans came, they occupied the place, she was waiting on them, and she was terrified – she had already encountered the German army on the road and just escaped by the skin of her teeth being interrogated.

They were absolutely unaware that she was using a Flemish name until one of them, the people in the hotel were hiding her, and then it turned out that the Germans had closed the gates of Antwerp. She’d hoped to get out, you see [UNCLEAR] she had this fellow who was driving her about but the car was taken, requisitioned, and she was stranded, she couldn’t get out.

So she had to stay anyway and then one of the Germans began to pay attention and ask about her. She never spoke. He said, who is that madchen who never speaks, and the hotel manager said, Oh she’s deaf, and they got very nervous. They locked Louie out in a little room and kept her there for days. She was pretty well starving and finally, after all sorts of adventures, she finally got out disguised as a maid and got over the border into Holland.

Then she went back to England and eventually she came back to Australia and that’s when she came into my life, as a real person as against a legend.

She was extremely difficult, in a way, because she’d never see things the way other people did. She just didn’t understand the conventions. She came to live in the North Shore line and then she lived in Mosman. If she’d gone and lived in Kings Cross or somewhere perhaps people wouldn’t have noticed – it wasn’t that she did anything but she just had this complete disregard. The day she turned up after all those years at her mother’s place, she announced she’d got married again. A terribly nice man. I turned out that he was 21 years younger than she was! He was awfully nice, he was absolutely darling, we all loved him, and they were very, very happy. He’d been gassed, he was one of the original Anzacs and he’d been an officer [41:55]. She met him in New Zealand, she was going around lecturing about her experiences, and anyway they settled in Chatswood. He died not long after. He was very ill; he had TB from the gas.

Louie was then alone and battling and this is when she started to get extremely difficult. She was worth it because she was so entertaining and she was so funny and she was so interesting. She had this wonderful joie de vivre and spirit and humour. She was really extraordinary.

If you do read this book, some of the conversations and the incidents with the family in the third part – the first part is when they’re growing up; the second part is when she’s abroad; and the third part is when she comes back and is the aunt.